When comparing UDK vs jMonkey3, the Slant community recommends UDK for most people. In the question“What are the best 3D game engines?”UDK is ranked 9th while jMonkey3 is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose UDK is:

UDK has an extremely large toolset that allows creating almost anything without having to use a 3rd party tool or plugin.

Pros

Pro

Large toolset

UDK has an extremely large toolset that allows creating almost anything without having to use a 3rd party tool or plugin.

Pro

Triple A track record

UDK is an engine used by many big name companies for popular games such as the Gears of War series.

Pro

Free and open-source

jMonkey is completely free, meaning it's possible to develop and release a game with no fees or royalties. Because it is open-source, jMonkey has plenty of people fixing bugs and, adding to the engine as well as creating a variety of plugins that can be used in the engine.

Pro

Not limited to using its own IDE

Unlike some engines, jMonkey doesn't force its own IDE. You can use its Netbeans-based IDE, but you can also set up a project to work in another IDE such as Eclipse. You can still use the special tools from jMonkey's IDE in such projects.

Pro

Engine modifications can be made using Java

Because jMonkey is implemented in Java, the same language its apps are typically developed in, developers will have an easier time modifying the engine to their needs.

Pro

Java is a great development platform

Java is a well-optimized just-in-time compiled language. It's faster than languages without an effective native-code compiler such as Python or Ruby, similar in speed to other just-in-time compiled languages such as C#, while slightly slower than compiled languages such as C or C++ (with some low-level and numeric benchmarks being similar to C++).

Java also has a wide variety of high-class IDEs available.

Pro

Ease of extensibility

Engine is modifiable.

Pro

Freedom of choice for architecture

The user is not compelled to use any programming architecture nor standard in order to make a project working. JME allows the freedom to use what is best for a game.

Pro

Offers both low-level and high-level ways of editing shaders

Modifying shaders can be done either via a visual tool called Shader Nodes or via GLSL that allow you to make your own shaders without the engine getting in the way or having to hack around to do so.

Pro

Multiplatform support

Code can be ported to mobile (iOS is in the works) and other Android supported devices with minor changes to the code (just change some implementations that vary on the platform such as inputs and user interface). It can even run on certain Raspberry Pi devices.

Has everything

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Cons

Con

Superseded by Unreal Engine 4

Con

DevKit only runs on Windows

Even though UDK can deploy games to run on multiple platforms, including Mac, it does not feature support for development on Mac.

Con

Limits games to FPS

UDK was originally developed for the FPS, "Unreal Tournament", and it certainly shows. While UDK is a very powerful engine, it takes quite a bit of work to make it do something other than an FPS.

Con

Not an engine for total beginners

While it's clear that you need to know Java first before using this engine, it is recommended that you have some programming experience as well. Most performance issues and memory leaks are more due to bad programming practices than the engine itself.

Con

Slow release cycle

jMonkey3 lacks manpower to have a fast and decent release cycle.

Con

Relies on archaic tool chain

jMonkey Engine uses Apache Ant for build automation, which is archaic and backwards, even by Java standards.

Con

Terrible API reference

The methods are not defined.

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